Murder by Candlelight (28 page)

As much as Ibsen, De Quincey knew that the trolls and goblins of myth are real, only, like Ibsen, he saw that they are not (as our ancestors supposed) outside of us, but inside. The old folk languages, however crude they might have been, were for his purposes superior to the ready-made idioms of his own day. The English prose of his time was formed largely on the models of eighteenth-century writers; and the eighteenth-century mind, if it was, as T. S. Eliot said, a mature one, was also, where the deeper springs of human passion are concerned, a shallow one. Compared to De Quincey's portrait of Williams, Gibbon's sketch of Commodus, the depraved tyrant “with an insatiate thirst of human blood,” is psychologically naïve: as instruments with which to probe the deeper recesses of mind and feeling, Gibbon's enlightened and neo-classical vocabularies are less supple than De Quincey's archaic-mythical ones.

As both a prose-writer and an historian of murder, De Quincey is a disciple of his hero, Edmund Burke: he uses the resources of the past to understand the complexities of the present. In this he resembles his contemporary Charles Lamb, who pillaged the old authors to form a prose “villainously pranked” with “antique modes and phrases,” but only in order that he might convey states of mind wholly modern. In the same way, De Quincey, who is closer in spirit to the unreformed prose masters who wrote before Swift than he is to Gibbon and Dr. Johnson, makes no fetish of the archaic, is always a
modern
ancient; and his antiquated style is the bearer of truths which are even now not obsolete.

De Quincey is the Tory historian of murder; but he wrote in an age of triumphant Whiggism, and was not understood. Nowhere is his insight into the erotically deformed killer more penetrating than when he argues that his malady is not acute but chronic. “All perils, specially malignant,” he says, “are recurrent.” The man with a taste for “unnatural luxury” does not “relapse into inertia”: he continues to seek satisfactions which are, for him, the only “condiment” capable of “seasoning the insipid monotonies of daily life.”

De Quincey warned that the sexually sullen man, nursing an erotic grudge against the world, would not be content to strike once: if he got the chance, he would strike again and again. He further believed that there would be more such men in the future. He lamented the “gathering agitation of our present English life,” with its “fierce condition of eternal hurry”: it was productive of “so chaotic a tumult” that the “eye of the calmest observer” was troubled. Modernity was an acid, one that rapidly corroded customs and restraints that in the past had done something to restrain the sick man's more vicious impulses. At the same time, the monster-cities of the modern world gave such a soul a new habitat in which to hunt: he found a protective coloration in the anonymity of the urban crowd, with which he could blend himself more easily than his counterparts in less congested ages.

De Quincey was a prophet; but like those of Cassandra, his prophecies were not believed. The evil that was not comprehended could not be rooted out; it flourished unnoticed, and like an unpruned weed assumed ever more rankly luxuriant forms. At last, a quarter of a century after De Quincey's death, it assumed a form so malignant that it could no longer be overlooked.

*
De Quincey drew extensively on the Wapping murders in his 1838 tale
The Avenger
, which describes a mass-murderer whose “human tiger-passion” rages “unchained” in a German city in 1816; but the most original insights of “Three Memorable Murders” are in the story sacrificed to the conventions of nineteenth-century melodrama.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Autumn Rose

And not far from me is the place where the Tauric altar of the quivered Goddess is fed with dreadful slaughter.

—
Ovid

I
t sometimes happens that a cultural form reaches its perfection only at the end of the generative season, when it blossoms with a fragrance which, amid so many presages of decay, seems sweeter than the perfumes of the prime. Such was the philosophy of Plato, the last expression of the pure original genius of Hellas before its extinguishment. Such was the antique virtue of Brutus and Cato as it flowered in a degenerate age of Caesarian dictatorship, the final vestige of the old republicanism of Rome before it succumbed to the corruptions of empire. Such, too, was that last and sweetest fruit of English Gothic art, the chapel of the King's College, Cambridge, crowned with pinnacles that asserted the pathos of a declining mediaevalism in the very dawn of English Renaissance.

The phenomenon of the autumn rose is not unknown in the morphology of murder: but, like all the flowers of evil, it blossoms only blackly. It was the great ambition of the Romantic poets to isolate a strain of horror that would rival those of Moloch-Dionysus antiquity, lust flowering hard by hate in “wanton rites . . . besmeared with blood.” But the springtide of Romanticism yielded only inferior blossoms: Byron's incests, Coleridge's ghouls, the fabricated monsters of the Shelleys—it is pretty tame stuff, when it is not actually ludicrous.

De Quincey, eschewing fiction, got farther: his writings on Charles Lloyd's madness, or the orphans of Blentarn Ghyl, or his own opium-taking are more terrible than anything in the poets. And yet his studies of the
summum malum
of horror—murder itself—leave, I think, something to be desired. Among the English authors of his century, De Quincey was the master scribe of murder, but he had the misfortune to live before the appearance of the century's master killer. It is as though Tacitus had lived before Nero, or Burke had died on the eve of the fall of the Bastille.

The discovery of the body of Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols in Buck's Row, Whitechapel, early in the morning of August 31, 1888, seemed, to an untrained eye, to herald the appearance of something new under the sun, a previously unsuspected species of evil. “At a quarter to four o'clock” that morning, says the writer for
The Times
, “Police Constable Neill, 97 J, when in Buck's Row, Whitechapel, came upon the body of a woman lying on a part of the footway.” On “stooping to raise her up in the belief that she was drunk, he discovered that her throat was cut almost from ear to ear.” Dr. Llewellyn, summoned from his surgery in Whitechapel Road, “discovered that, besides the gash across the throat,” the woman had suffered “terrible wounds in the abdomen.” The police ambulance came, and the body was taken to Bethnal Green Police Station, where a “further examination showed the horrible nature of the crime, there being other fearful cuts and gashes, any one of which was sufficient to cause death apart from the wounds across the throat.”

It was the first of a series of murders which, in their overripe malignity, threw those of the century's other killers into the shade. The consummate figure had appeared; but there was no scholar to do justice to his deviltry.

To be sure, the time was ripe for his appearance. London had once been a city of parishes, of little cities within the big one, each with its own highly developed protocols of soul-care. In its pastoral prime, in the high mediaeval city, the parish bore responsibility for the souls of its flock; the phrase “lost lamb” was not yet a sentimentality. But an influx of newcomers overwhelmed the old social architecture, and by the nineteenth century it had broken down. It was replaced by a modern police system, one that cared less for saving souls than solving crimes; the wheels of its machines began to turn only
after
the sick soul had done something morbid. Nor did the police have any notion of the particular kinds of soul-sickness which were growing ever more prevalent in the metropolis. De Quincey, working imaginatively on opium, had compiled, in “Three Memorable Murders,” a kind of dossier on the nature of the mass killer, a résumé of his attributes; and Krafft-Ebing's
Psychopathia Sexualis
, which appeared in 1886, had supplemented his findings with a wealth of new detail. But neither work had penetrated the consciousness of the police, or indeed of the public.

Anyone today who rummages about the files of Victorian newspapers will see that other artists were working in the same macabre line as the Whitechapel killer, and anticipated his methods. But their significance was overlooked, not only by the police, but by the English clerisy as a whole, by the writers, politicians, and civil servants who directed the intellectual gabble of the age. The clouds had long been gathering on the horizon; but with the exception, perhaps, of a few souls such as Mr. Ruskin, none had recognized in them the portents of the coming storm.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Weight of Incubus

unrecognized compulsions of my being

—
Ralph Ellison

S
t. Giles's in the 1860s was as vile as ever, and George Street in particular was “one of the worst neighborhoods in the metropolis.” Beasts of prey pursued their courses for the most part unmolested by authority, although on occasion they were brought to justice. In 1861 there was a notorious incident in George Street in which a cab-driver, according to
The Times
, attempted “to get a young woman who had been his fare into one of the brothels there.” He first “hocused” her—stupefied her with drugs—and afterwards stripped her naked. But in “consequence of the resistance offered by the person who was in charge of the house,” the cabman was “prevented from carrying out the worst part of his design,” and was captured, tried, and convicted.

Two years later, in April 1863, another young woman found herself in George Street. Emma Jackson was not a typical “unfortunate.” She had a home and a family; she lived with her mother, a shirt-maker, and her father, an unemployed clerk, in Berwick Street, Soho. Twenty-eight years old, she was said to be of a “quiet, peaceable” disposition, though given to occasional “fits of irregularity.” She would “remain at home for weeks working hard” at her shirts, one of her girlfriends recalled, and “conducting herself reputably,” but then she would “break out.” She would leave home for days together and “go with anybody.”

Around seven o'clock on the morning of Thursday, April 9, 1863, Emma Jackson was seen on the doorstep of No. 4 George Street. With her was a man in his late twenties, in a dark coat and dark trousers. He stood about five foot seven and was fair-haired; he wore a wideawake hat and had small, rather sunken eyes.

No. 4 George Street was one of those houses which “took in people at all hours, without inquiry as to their characters.” As Emma Jackson and her man came in, another couple was going out. The servant girl, Martha Curley, showed them to the back room on the first floor; the man gave her a shilling for her pains.

The couple hired the room for the morning only, but noon came and went with no sign of them. Sometime between four and five o'clock, Miss Curley told the under-servant, Catharine Mulind, to go upstairs and “find out why the parties had not left the room.” On entering it, Miss Mulind found it streaming with blood; the “bed was saturated and the walls spattered” with it. Emma Jackson lay on her back on the bed with the staring eyes of death. She “only had on her chemise,” which “was turned low below the breasts.” Her neck and hair were “a mass of congealed blood.” Her throat had been “frightfully cut,” and the internal jugular vein severed; she had suffered a number of puncture wounds, and on the back of her neck were “two large stabs running obliquely towards each other.” On her “left buttock was a mark of the grasp of two fingers,” and the window was open.

Miss Jackson's father and brother were summoned to identify the body; and one of her girlfriends told the police that she had seen Emma that morning “in the company of a foreigner, who was having his boots cleaned at the corner of Greek Street
^*
and Compton Street.”